Sprint, Best Buy Offering Students a Year of Free Cellphone Service

Students who take part in the deal get a year of free service, including unlimited talk and text as well as 1GB of data per month.

With University Pages, LinkedIn Unveils Its Youthful Ambitions

The professional network company aims to target younger users in its latest product release.
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QOTD: Never Mind Your GPA — When’s Your IPO?

The center of gravity at the university appears to have shifted. The school now looks like a giant tech incubator with a football team.

Nicholas Thompson, in a New Yorker article entitled, “The End of Stanford?”

HP Sets New Labor Guidelines in China

Targeting student labor.

StudyHall Offers New Site for Collaborative Course Work (And Books!)

New start-up StudyHall wants to offer a campus alternative to Blackboard — through students, rather than school administrators.

Why Tablets in the Classroom Could Save Schools $3 Billion a Year

And why that’s not much at all.

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Tech Titans Fund Undocumented Students

A group of Silicon Valley technology leaders, impatient with attempts to rewrite immigration laws, is funding efforts to help undocumented youths attend college, find jobs and stay in the country despite their illegal status.

News Byte

Academic Social Network Raises Cash From Former Facebook Exec and Others

New York-based Coursekit, a social network for instructors to manage courses and interact with students, has raised $5 million in a first round. The round was led by Social+Capital Partnership, a firm started by former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya. Existing investor IA Ventures and new angel investors also participated. Coursekit, which became available in November, was founded by Joseph Cohen, 20, and two other undergraduate students at University of Pennsylvania.

Voices

College One-Stop Shop: Chegg Buys Web Tutoring Service

Online textbook rental and education service Chegg Inc. has acquired Web tutoring service Student of Fortune, Inc. for cash and company stock as the start-up broadens its business to try to become a one-stop-shop for college students.

News Byte

Missouri Limits Student-Teacher Social Networking

It’s one of those laws that could write a million headlinesvariations on “Missouri Bans Students and Teachers From Friending Each Other on Facebook!” So what’s really going on? As part of a broader child sexual abuse prevention bill signed July 14, the state of Missouri will soon prohibit teachers from using personal sites that allow for private conversations with current or former students — something some local teachers think is a very bad idea.